Recently, numerous flexible structures have been employed in various fields of industry. Loading conditions sustained by these flexible structures are often not described well enough for engineering analyses even though these conditions are important. Here, a flexible tent with an interior Collective Protection System, which is subjected to an explosion, is analyzed. The tent protects personnel from biological and chemical agents with a pressurized liner inside the tent as an environmental barrier. Field tests showed unexpected damage to the liner, and most of the damage occurred on tent's leeward side. To solve this problem, various tests and analyses have been performed, involving material characteristics of the liner, canvas, and zip seals, modeling of the blast loading over the tent and inside the tent, and structural response of the tent to the blast loading as collaborative research works with others. It was found that the blast loading and the structural response can not be analyzed separately due to the interaction between the flexible structure and the dynamic pressure loading. In this dissertation, the dynamic loadings imposed on both the interior and the exterior sides of the tent structure due to the airblasts and the resulting dynamic responses were studied. First, the blast loadings were obtained by a newly proposed theoretical method of analytical/empirical models which was developed into a FORTRAN program. Then, a numerical method of an iterative Fluid-Structure Interaction using Computational Fluid Dynamics and Computational Structural Dynamics was employed to simulate the blast wave propagation inside and outside the flexible structure and to calculate the dynamic loads on it. All the results were compared with the field test data conducted by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The experimental pressure data were gathered from pressure gauges attached to the tent surfaces at different locations. The comparison showed that the proposed methods can be a good design tool to analyze the loading conditions for rigid or flexible structures under explosive loads. In particular, the causes of the failure of the liner on the leeward were explained. Also, the results showed that the effect of fluid-structure interaction should be considered in the pressure load calculation on the structure where the structural deflection rate can influence the solution of the flow field surrounding the structure. / Ph. D.

A global view of power system's frequency opens up a new window to the "world" of large system's dynamics. With the aid of global positioning system (GPS), measurements from different locations can be time-synchronized; therefore, a system-wide observation and analysis would be possible. As part of the U.S. nation-wide power frequency monitoring network project (FNET), the first part of the study focuses on utilizing system simulation as a tool to assess the frequency measurement accuracy needed to observe frequency oscillations from events such as remote generation drops in three U.S. power systems. Electromechanical wave propagation phenomena during system disturbances, such as generation trip, load rejection and line opening, have been observed and discussed. Further uniform system models are developed to investigate the detailed behaviors of wave propagation. Visualization tool is developed to help to view frequency behavior simulations. Frequency replay from simulation data provides some insights of how these frequency electromechanical waves propagate when major events occur. The speeds of electromechanical wave propagation in different areas of the U.S. systems, as well as the uniform models were estimated and their characteristics were discussed. Theoretical derivation between the generator's mechanical powers and bus frequencies is provided and the delayed frequency response is illustrated. Field-measured frequency data from FNET are also examined. Outlier removal and wavelet-based denoising signal processing techniques are applied to filter out spikes and noises from measured frequency data. System's frequency statistics of three major U.S. power grids are investigated. Comparison between the data from phasor measurement unit (PMU) at a high voltage substation and from FNET taken from 110 V outlets at distribution level illustrates the close tracking between the two. Several generator trip events in the Eastern Interconnection System and the Western Electricity Coordinating Council system are recorded and the frequency patterns are analyzed. Our trigger program can detect noticeable frequency drop or rise and sample results are shown in a 13 month period. In addition to transient states' observation, the quasi-steady-state, such as oscillations, can also be observed by FNET. Several potential applications of FNET in the areas of monitoring & analysis, system control, model validation, and others are discussed. Some applications of FNET are still beyond our imagination. / Ph. D.

Protection from the potentially damaging effects of shock loading is a common design requirement for diverse mechanical structures ranging from shock accelerometers to spacecraft. High-damping viscoelastic materials are employed in the design of geometrically complex impact absorbent components. Since shock transients have a broadband frequency spectrum, it is imperative to properly model frequency dependence of material parameters. The Anelastic Displacement Fields (ADF) method is employed to develop new axisymmetric and plane stress finite elements that are capable of modeling frequency dependent material behavior of linear viscoelastic materials. The new finite elements are used to model and analyze behavior of viscoelastic structures subjected to shock loads. The development of such ADF-based finite element models offers an attractive analytical tool to aid in the design of shock absorbent mechanical filters. This work will also show that it is possible to determine material properties’ frequency dependence by iteratively fitting ADF model predictions to experimental results. A series of experiments designed to validate the axisymmetric and plane stress finite element models are performed. These experiments involve the propagation of longitudinal waves through elastic and viscoelastic rods, and behavior of elastomeric mechanical filters subjected to shock. Comparison of model predictions to theory and experiments confirm that ADF-based finite element models are capable of capturing phenomena such as geometric dispersion and viscoelastic attenuation of longitudinal waves in rods as well as modeling the behavior of mechanical filters subjected to shock. / Ph. D.

The research presented in this thesis is all based on the impedance method for structural health monitoring. The impedance method is an electro-mechanical technique which utilizes a single piezoelectric transducer as both a sensor and actuator. Due to the high frequencies of excitation used for the method, the sensing area for damage detection can be very localized. Previous work has shown that wave propagation can be added to systems already equipped with hardware for impedance-based structural health monitoring. The work in this thesis shows what happens under varying temperature conditions for a structure being monitored with wave propagation. A technique to compensate for temperature fluctuations is also presented. The work presented here is an initial study to directly correlate the actual amount of damage in a composite specimen with a damage metric indicated by impedance-based structural health monitoring. Two different damage mechanisms are examined: transverse matrix cracking and edge delamination. With both composite defects, a sample is interrogated with the impedance method before and after damage is introduced. The exact amount of damage in each specimen is found using radiography and compared with the health monitoring results. Traditional impedance techniques require the use of a bulky and expensive impedance analyzer. With the trend of structural health monitoring moving towards unobtrusive sensors which can be permanently placed on a structure, an impedance analyzer does not lend itself to these small, low power consuming requirements. In this thesis, an initial attempt to miniaturize the hardware is described. A prototype impedance-based structural health monitoring system, incorporating wireless based communications, is fabricated and validated with experimental testing on a number of different structures. The first steps towards a complete self-contained, robust structural health monitoring sensor are presented. / Master of Science

The design of cellular wireless communication systems is influenced by the propagation characteristics of the channel and their effect on transmitted signals. The multipath propagation characteristics of a channel, except under simple transmission conditions, limits the design of emerging cellular systems. Once the propagation conditions are understood, systems can be designed more efficiently in terms of site layout and frequency planning, to reduce deployment costs and improve performance. A software tool for site specific radio propagation prediction is being developed at the Mobile and Portable Radio Group, Virginia Tech. The objective of this research is to develop re-usable program modules that can be utilized to implement several functional features of the software. This thesis describes the raster and vector programming libraries that have been developed during this research. These libraries are utilized in the database module, user interface and graphics module and propagation prediction module of the software. Significant among the capabilities that these libraries provide are the ability to store and retrieve raster and vector data from the database, import measured and predicted data available in standard data formats into the database, obtain user inputs through an interactive mechanism, display images of site specific information at various resolutions, and enable the user to view and analyze measured and predicted data. This thesis also presents the data format, that has been defined during this research, to acquire and import contour and elevation information of buildings. The SISP General Data Format (GDF), that has been developed, to facilitate import of measured and predicted data has also been described. The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF), developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), has been adopted to store measured and predicted data in the database. The programming techniques used to retrieve and display data stored in this format are also outlined in this thesis. SISP has been developed on Sun Sparc workstations. Details of the function libraries that have been developed, programming methodologies employed, and data formats that have been defined for site specific and measured and predicted RF data are included in this thesis. / Master of Science

An axisymmetric finite element solution method is developed for axial wave propagation through a series of threaded connections in rock drills. A piston impacts axially on a string of rods held together by threaded joints and the wave propagates through these joints before reaching the bit. The energy lost in the joints limits the maximum effective depth of the drill. Several computational techniques are used to efficiently model the problem. Non-reflecting boundaries are used to numerically absorb the waves as they exit a joint. The stored waves are then re-initiated into the next joint eliminating modeling of the entire assembly of rods. The preload in the threads is modeled by shrinking the threaded sleeve onto the rods. A new dynamic relaxation damping scheme is used which starts with an undamped model and then increases the damping until the solution converges. This method converges more rapidly than the standard constant damping. / Master of Science

The safety concern of aging aircraft is a rising issue in terms of both safety and cost. An aircraft structure failure during flight is unacceptable. A method needs to be developed and standardized to test the integrity of both commercial and military aircrafts. The current method to test the structure of an aircraft requires the aircraft to be taken out of service for inspection; this is costly due to the inspection required to be performed and the lost use from downtime. A novice idea of an on-site structural health monitoring (SHM) system has been proposed to test the integrity of aircraft structure. An on-site system is a system that can be used to perform inspection on an aircraft simultaneously while the aircraft is in use. This SHM system uses the principles of active lamb wave and passive acoustic emission through the use of piezoelectric sensors as the sensing elements. Piezoelectric sensors can be used both as an input device and as a sensing element. This research focuses on the development of the major data acquisition electronic components of the system. These components are charge amplifier, high pass filter, low pass filter and line driver. A charge amplifier converts a high impedance signal to a low impedance signal. A high pass filter attenuates the low frequency content of a signal, while a low pass filter attenuates the high frequency content of a signal. A line driver converts a low current signal to a high current signal. All of these components need to operate up to a frequency of 2 MHz. Off-the-shelf electronics will be used for prototyping as custom components will not be feasible at this point of the research. / Master of Science

We present immersed discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for one and two dimensional acoustic wave propagation problems in inhomogeneous media where elements are allowed to be cut by the material interface. The proposed methods use the standard discontinuous Galerkin finite element formulation with polynomial approximation on elements that contain one fluid while on interface elements containing more than one fluid they use specially-built piecewise polynomial shape functions that satisfy appropriate interface jump conditions. The finite element spaces on interface elements satisfy physical interface conditions from the acoustic problem in addition to extended conditions derived from the system of partial differential equations. Additional curl-free and consistency conditions are added to generate bilinear and biquadratic piecewise shape functions for two dimensional problems. We established the existence and uniqueness of one dimensional immersed finite element shape functions and existence of two dimensional bilinear immersed finite element shape functions for the velocity. The proposed methods are tested on one dimensional problems and are extended to two dimensional problems where the problem is defined on a domain split by an interface into two different media. Our methods exhibit optimal $O(h^{p+1})$ convergence rates for one and two dimensional problems. However it is observed that one of the proposed methods is not stable for two dimensional interface problems with high contrast media such as water/air. We performed an analysis to prove that our immersed Petrov-Galerkin method is stable for interface problems with high jumps across the interface. Local time-stepping and parallel algorithms are used to speed up computation. Several realistic interface problems such as ether/glycerol, water/methyl-alcohol and water/air with a circular interface are solved to show the stability and robustness of our methods. / Ph. D.

To investigate seismic resolution of deep mantle plumes as well as the robustness of the anti-correlation between bulk sound speed and S wave speed imaged in the lowermost mantle, we use a Spectral Element Method (SEM) to simulate global seismic wave propagation in 3-D wavespeed models and measure frequency-dependent P-, S-, Pdiff- and Sdiff-wave traveltime anomalies caused by plume structures in the lowermost mantle. We compare SEM time delay measurements with calculations based on ray theory and show that an anti-correlation between bulk sound speed and S-wave speed could be produced as an artifact. This is caused by different wavefront healing effects between P waves and S waves in thermal plume models. The bulk sound speed structure remains poorly resolved when P-wave and S-wave measurements are at different periods with similar wavelength. The differences in wave diffraction between the two types of waves depend on epicentral distance and wave frequency. The artifact in anti-correlation is also confirmed in tomographic inversions based on ray theory using Pdiff and Sdiff time delay measurements made on the SEM synthetics. This indicates a chemical origin of "superplumes" in the lowermost mantle may not be necessary to explain observed seismic traveltimes. The same set of Pdiff and Sdiff measurements are inverted using finite-frequency tomography based on Born sensitivity kernels. We show that wavefront healing effects can be accounted for in finite-frequency tomography to recover the true velocity model. / Master of Science

This thesis investigates statistical correlation as a means to enhance the use of ground-based radar in analyzing satellite-path millimeter wave propagation through rain and ice crystals. The technique presented involves correlating dB values of the satellite signal attenuation and polarization isolation with dBZ values of radar backscatter from each of 128 range gates. In it, Pearson product moment correlation coefficients are calculated for attenuation and backscatter and for isolation and backscatter. When these coefficients are plotted versus radar range, one of four certain characteristic patterns usually appears. Ice-crystal depolarization produces a pattern of near zero attenuation coefficients and varying isolation coefficients. Rain produces a correlation pattern in which the attenuation coefficient pattern is nearly mirror image of the isolation coefficient pattern. A special case of the rain event occurs when the cross-polarized satellite signal is essentially constant. The correlation patterns for this case are exact mirror images. Rain attenuation and depolarization accompanied by additional depolarization from another source, produce a correlation pattern that is not symmetrical. This is due to the additional depolarization. Discussion of these expected patterns and examples of each are presented. / Master of Science